All things DevOps

My cisco 2950 came with an older IOS version 12.1, but more importantly, one that does not support encryption, and thus I cannot use SSH. I need to upgrade the code aka IOS Image on this switch to enable SSH. So here we go, I’ll be referencing the following guide : http://kb.promise.com/KnowledgebaseArticle10139.aspx throughout this how to article. Note: You should be in enable/privilege 15 mode for the duration of this article.

Cisco Image & TFTP Server

I had to register for the Cisco site to download the latest image, with support for encryption. This is the image I will be installing : c2950-i6k2l2q4-mz.121-22.EA14.bin

After the image is downloaded, we need to configure the TFTP server. Mac OS X comes with tftpd automatically. You are going to want to place the imagine in /private/tftpboot. After you have copied the image there, make absolutely sure you update the permissions. Otherwise, your tftp request will timeout from your device.

Uh oh shaggy ! I am out of space. After doing a ‘dir flash’ I saw that really I had no choice, but to delete my existing flash image to make room for the new one. Feels dangerous and scary, but luckily this is my lab environment 🙂